This project started as a classroom project at the NationaI Institute of Design as an exercise in Design of Information Systems during my Graphic Design course. It culminated into a 'Proposed System' that works towards Economic Literacy in India.
Duration of project: 8 weeks
While researching for the project I found extensive data to lead me to believe in the importance of Economic Literacy in todays time.
Realise, how little people know about economics and how distorted that information is. See, how people hate the subject, are scared of it, because its too complicated or its unknown; and how its become an 'elitist' subject.
I would like to share what led me to believe in the importance and need for educating everyone about economics.
The year was 2005, and the atmosphere was celebratory at a gathering of banking experts in Jackson Hole in the United States. There was much back patting at the send-off party for the chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan. And then one man went and spoilt it all.
Raghuram Rajan, then the chief economic adviser to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), in a paper presented at the conference, pretty much blamed Greenspan for a crisis that he felt was brewing, thanks to an ill-regulated banking system.
Coming at a time when the world economy was supposedly in the best of shapes, the reaction among the assembled people was sharp. "I exaggerate only a bit when I say I felt like an early Christian who had wandered into a convention of half-starved lions," Rajan writes in his book Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy. "As I walked away from the podium... I felt some unease. It was not caused by the criticism itself... Rather it was because the critics seemed to be ignoring what was going on before their eyes."
My hypotheses:
1. If we paid attention to what the economists are (literally) deciding FOR us, like we scrutinise politics, would that lead to better economic policies?
2. Would understanding, seeing and using simple concepts of economics in daily life lead to a higher interest (if not better understanding) in national and world economics?
3. Economics, defined in my words, is a social science that studies our behaviour, finds patterns and tries to put it into graphs, to enable the management (of a company or country) to use it. But that should not mean that economics can only exploit and never help the common man. It could also be a common tool for daily decision making!
The project, owing to the subject matter, was a complex and serious one. Cultures and social settings also influence economic behaviour. In absence of enough examples or an expert to identify and decode these everyday examples from lives of Indian households and markets, it was difficult to find content of that kind. I have therefore attempted to work around the problem by talking about a few things that are more socially/culturally neutral in nature.
Hope you enjoy it!
